Washington Post Claims Win Result Of Republican Party Establishment Being Brilliantly Competent

Really? The same people that lost in 2006, lost in 2008, watched from the sidelines as the Tea Party won the 2010 election for them, and lost in 2012 with computer systems that suppressed Republican votes all of the sudden are so brilliant and competent they could overcome any curve ball thrown their way? The very same Karl Rove’s and Reince Priebus’ and Republican National Committee with an eight year record of almost non-stop defeats, all of a sudden is so competent and dazzlingly smart that the Washington Post is awed to the point they write a 16 page (internet) puff piece about them today?

With the Washington Post it is good to remember that they are uber-Democrats who generally despise Republicans. To illustrate just how extreme the Washington Post’s allegiance is to the Democrat Party, I had a conversation once with Helen Harwood not knowing of her connection to the Post. WP political bias came up, she challenged me to give one example of how the WP was biased in favor of Democrats. I told her of an AIM Report that had found out all but one editor of the Post was registered as a Democrat and the one exception was a sports editor, think it was 24 of 25 being Democrats.

She went from being very pleasant to being irate and asked me who that one Republican was, “I want his name, I WANT HIS NAME!” I asked her why? She responded with great vengeance in her voice “I WILL MAKE SURE HE IS FIRED!”

She had already given me her business card at a computer convention we were both exhibiting at in Washington DC. Later that day I met with Don and Reed Irvine of AIM (Accuracy in Media) and told them about this. They asked what her name was and I handed them her card. They bellowed with laughter, then told me Helen was the daughter of top Washington Post executive Richard Harwood. I do not know if the Post hunted down that lone Republican and fired him or not.

With that is mind here is the Washington Post article about how brilliantly competent the Republican Establishment is. What do you think is the real motivation of the Washington Post to write this article?

One night in early September, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called a longtime colleague, Sen. Pat Roberts, from his living room in Louisville, furious about the 78-year-old Republican’s fumbling and lethargic reelection campaign.

Roberts had raised a paltry $62,000 in August. He was airing no ads. His campaign staff, mostly college students, had gone back to school. Most worrisome, McConnell had in his hands a private polling memo predicting Roberts would lose in Kansas — an alarming possibility that could cost the GOP a Senate majority.

McConnell was blunt. A shake-up was needed. Roberts unleashed a flurry of expletives at McConnell. Ultimately, though, the ex-Marine gave in. The next day, he led campaign manager Leroy Towns, 70, a retired college professor and confidant, into a Topeka conference room and fired him. There were tears. “It hurt,” Towns said.

Eleven hundred miles away in Richmond, Va., Chris LaCivita, a hard-charging Republican fixer, was on his back deck picking apart steamed crabs and drinking beer with friends when he got the order to fly to Kansas. The Republican rescue was underway.

While Republicans were moving to address their problems, Democrats were trying to overcome problems of their own — including difficulties with a White House suspicious of their leadership and protective of the president’s reputation, his political network and his biggest donors.

After years of tension between President Obama and his former Senate colleagues, trust between Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue had eroded. A fight between the White House and Senate Democrats over a relatively small sum of money had mushroomed into a major confrontation.

At a March 4 Oval Office meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other Senate leaders pleaded with Obama to transfer millions in party funds and to also help raise money for an outside group. “We were never going to get on the same page,” said David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff. “We were beating our heads against the wall.”

The tension represented something more fundamental than money — it was indicative of a wider resentment among Democrats in the Capitol of how the president was approaching the election and how, they felt, he was dragging them down. All year on the trail, Democratic incumbents would be pounded for administration blunders beyond their control — the disastrous rollout of the health-care law, problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs, undocumented children flooding across the border, Islamic State terrorism and fears about Ebola.

As these issues festered, many Senate Democrats would put the onus squarely on the president — and they were keeping their distance from him.

“The president’s approval rating is barely 40 percent,” Krone said. “What else more is there to say? . . . He wasn’t going to play well in North Carolina or Iowa or New Hampshire. I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean that the message was bad, but sometimes the messenger isn’t good.”

This account of the battle for the Senate is based on four dozen extensive interviews with candidates, campaign operatives, party leaders and super PAC strategists on both sides, as well as current and former White House advisers. Several officials were granted anonymity to speak candidly in advance of Election Day.

From the outset of the campaign, Republicans had a simple plan: Don’t make mistakes, and make it all about Obama, Obama, Obama. Every new White House crisis would bring a new Republican ad. And every Democratic incumbent would be attacked relentlessly for voting with the president 97 or 98 or 99 percent of the time.

But none of that would work if Republicans did not get the right candidates, a basic tenet that had eluded them in recent elections. This time, party officials pushed bad candidates out, recruited and coached contenders with broad appeal and resuscitated two flailing incumbents, Roberts and Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi.

Rival organizations also improved coordination with each other and beefed up their opposition research to wreak havoc on Democrats, while the party closed the gap on data, digital and voter turnout programs.

“We had to recruit candidates, and we had to train them,” said Rob Collins, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). “We had to bring back our incumbents. We had to modernize creaky campaigns. And we had to prevent the mistakes that have plagued our party.”

Democrats began the 2014 campaign with a big disadvantage: They had to defend seats in six deeply Republican states — enough to lose the Senate — and a handful of others in swing states.

Burdened by the climate, Democrats believed they still could win if they localized races and framed each as a choice between two candidates. The strategy worked in 2012. On his office windowsill at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the group’s executive director, Guy Cecil, displayed a beer mug shaped like a cowboy boot with the name “Heidi” on the side — a reminder of how Democrat Heidi Heitkamp won a Senate seat that year in heavily Republican North Dakota.

Senate Democrats calculated that to win in red states, they also had to alter the midterm electorate.

Another question hung over the party, as well: Could the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill work together?

Democratic fault lines

Aboard Air Force One on Nov. 7, 2012, as Obama returned to the White House from Chicago after celebrating his reelection, two of his top political advisers, Pfeiffer and David Plouffe, chatted about how difficult the midterm map would be.

Obama told his team that his No. 1 political goal was to keep the Senate under Democratic control. “He was very focused on that,” said a senior White House official. “We made a decision to be pretty deferential to the candidates and the campaign committee about how to go about doing that.”

But what the White House saw as deference and support, Senate Democrats viewed as “lip service,” in the words of Krone.

This past Sunday, two days before Election Day, Krone sat at a mahogany conference table in the majority leader’s stately suite just off the Senate floor and shared with Washington Post reporters his notes of White House meetings. Reid’s top aide wanted to show just how difficult he thought it had been to work with the White House.

With Democrats under assault from Republican super-PAC ads, Reid and his lieutenants, Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), went to the Oval Office on March 4 to ask Obama for help. They wanted him to transfer millions of dollars from the Democratic National Committee to the DSCC, a relatively routine transaction.